Thanks Ray and Ken,
I finally managed to get it to calibrate with PHD2 thanks to a lot of help from Terry. The thing that helped the most was his suggestion to "run in" the AO by using the utility and calibrating it 50x. Prior to that I had to free the motors using a small screwdriver - easy to do once you realize what you are doing!
Results with PHD2 were impressive on the first imaging attempt. But, I have some sort of star aspect distortion in my images now. The AO is mounted in front of an ONAG. Everything is threaded though the AO has one dovetail connection. Perhaps it's that. I will remove the AO first to make sure it's not in the ONAG/camera part of the image train.
The other "big" issue I'm attempting to solve, and the primary reason I got the AO, has to do with trying to use the AO to eliminate DF between my two imaging scopes (on same mount). I hope to guide the mount with scope 1 via TSX, and use the AO (without mount corrections!!) on scope 2. So far experiments are quite poor. Guiding with scope 1 is causing huge errors to register in PHD2 and the AO. The resulting image is unusable. When I turn off guiding in TSX the AO works great. I have tried reducing the number of corrections sent to the mount by TSX by increasing the guide exposure or delay. This helps some but there is a limit. What I'm unsure about is whether I should be upping the AO rate or actually really reducing it quite a lot. Without the AO my scopes can go 5 min+ without DF showing so by that reasoning maybe I only need an AO correction every minute or so. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Peter
|